#context-window
Every post tagged "context-window".
36 posts · showing 11–20
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Should Your Agent Remember That, or Just Look It Up Again?
Two questions sort every fact an agent encounters into "write it down" or "fetch it fresh" — and getting the sort wrong is how an assistant ends up confidently quoting a meeting that moved last week.
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Handing an Agent a PDF: Three Paths Into the Context
A PDF never enters a context window — something derived from it does. The counterparty name right and the date wrong usually means the document took the wrong path in.
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Budgeting the Context Window: Dividing a Fixed Space
The window wasn't full and the constraints still vanished — because six claimants compete for one space and nobody allocated it. Making history the residual rather than a claimant is what makes the scheme work.
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Agent Vocabulary: What the Terms Actually Mean
People discussing the same word are frequently discussing different things. Four of the distinctions are load-bearing — and when an agent conversation isn't converging, it's usually one of them.
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Prompt Engineering Was the Beginning, Not the Skill
It got named as a discipline when the prompt was the entire interface. It's now one input among several — and if better prompts have stopped helping, five specific things are usually why.
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Context Engineering Is the Job Now
Not prompt writing — that's the visible part and the small one. The work is deciding what reaches the model, in what form, at what moment, and it's where most agent failures start.
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What a Harness Actually Is, and Why It's the Real Product
A model takes messages and returns tool calls. Everything else is the harness — and it explains almost all the variance between agent systems that share the same model.
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Longer Context Windows Won't Fix Long-Horizon Tasks
The premise is right — things fall out of context — and the conclusion doesn't follow. Most long-run failures aren't about storage, and a bigger window removes the discipline that was helping.
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The Parts of Your Job an Agent Can't See
The code, the tests, the tickets — that sounds like most of the job. What's missing is why the system is shaped this way, what's about to change, and what the requester meant rather than wrote.
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Designing the First Turn: What Happens Before Any Tool Call
Everything after it inherits the frame it sets. Four things belong in turn one — and when a run fails at turn twelve, this is usually where the defect was introduced.